A Chat with Ned Stranger (20.05.22)
Drawing together flamenco-inspired grooves, classical piano and neo-soul beats, Austria-based Ned Stranger brings a boundary-breaking sound to our ears. We speak with Ned Stranger about his EP Enter The Hero, celebrity crushes, future plans and more.
OSR: What drew you to music?
Ned Stranger: My parents were super encouraging and had me learning the piano and violin from quite a young age, but it was only when I was 13 and one of my sisters suggested I learn the guitar that I became completely music obsessed. Around the same time, my granddad found an old, battered classical guitar in his attic and thought it used to belong to my dad, so I volunteered to take it off their hands and started trying to write songs pretty music straightaway (whilst learning the usual Greenday and Hendrix and Metallica). I’m now learning flamenco and love classical music again so have sort of come full circle, bringing those influences into my latest songwriting!
OSR: What do you hope people take from your music?
Ned Stranger: I love trying to tackle big topics – climate change, life purpose, jealousy, nostalgia – but from a super personal perspective, so the songs are like snapshots of how I’m feeling at that particular time and I suppose I want people to take their own unique perspective as well. It’s a great question actually, it dovetails with questions around the purpose of songwriters and artists. I suppose on a really basic level I just want people to feel something that takes them out of the rush of day-to-day life, makes them stop and think (or feel!) even for a bit.
OSR: Is there a backstory to your EP Enter The Hero?
Ned Stranger: From an instrumentation point of view, I was really into the neo-soul percussion grooves of Tom Misch’s instrumental stuff, plus having a bit of a Muse rediscovery phase – and I’d spent that winter holed up in my room trying to write a novel and listening to loads of classical music (Chopin, Brahms, Rachmaninoff). I really wanted to create a record that was richer with real drums and some piano and more flamboyant guitar rhythms. I actually wrote the title track as a part of a five-day writing challenge I did during the first Covid lockdown and stole the name from a chapter of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita!
In terms of theme, it’s supposed to be an EP about the end of the world, and the people that stand in the way (whether in a good or a bad sense) – the result of reading too many existentialist books (The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich, etc)
OSR: Did you face any challenges when recording Enter The Hero?
Ned Stranger: The hardest thing was probably getting the drum sound right as my producer and I were using a pretty rudimental set-up in his parent’s house. I hadn’t been able to perform the songs a lot beforehand (because of Covid) so I was getting to know them in the studio for the first time, a little like marrying someone before you’ve had time to date them!
OSR: Do you have a favourite track on the EP? If so, which one and why that song?
Ned Stranger: I’m really proud of ‘Enter the Hero’, just love the swag at the beginning, but ‘The Setting Sun’ feels like one of my most ambitious songs with the long drawn-out intro and the flamenco rhythms and that passage I stole from Brahms 1st Piano Concerto in the instrumental breakdown, so I should probably go with that!
OSR: What about a least favourite track?
Ned Stranger: Great question! I finished writing ‘Call to Prayer’ after an agonising few years trying to get it right. I was in Istanbul during the coup attempt that happened in 2016 and really wanted to write a song capturing the ambience at the time and the feeling of helplessness as an outsider. I still don’t feel I quite got it right so I don’t have closure yet on the song!
OSR: If you could change anything about Enter THe Hero, what would it be and why?
Ned Stranger: I think I’d like to make it sound even richer, ideally with a full orchestra and choir but there are always budget problems ?. Otherwise the usual specific things about certain lyrics not being quite perfect in carrying the main meaning of the song, or bits of vocal that I think I could’ve nailed better!
OSR: Alright, some random questions. What is the weirdest dream you have ever had?
Ned Stranger: I don’t remember a lot of my dreams (even when I try to write them down), but occasionally I have these sort of pseudo-nightmares where something relatively innocuous happens within a dream that shouldn’t really scare me but still jolts me awake with a really unsettling feeling. Like one time I was on a mountain with strong winds and I was trying to shout a warning to my friend about 20 metres away, something about a storm approaching, and he couldn’t hear me and I think the dream sort of imploded (like a rapid volume swell and then complete silence) as I woke up. If I had to interpret it (and I suppose given my recent move to Vienna and the land of Sigmund Freud I probably should try), I’d say it came from an unconscious fear that something bad was about to happen and my complete helplessness around that. Anyone know what the next apocalypse is going to be?
OSR: Who was your first celebrity crush?
Ned Stranger: Probably still not over Matt Bellamy from Muse ?! I find it hard to have a crush on someone I’ve not met. It probably sounds silly but I’m such a conversational person that it’s hard to be attracted through a screen or from a distance!
OSR: If you could spend a weekend with any musician (living or dead), who would it be and why?
Ned Stranger: Probably Mozart. I don’t think you could beat him for having a laugh whilst also being blown away by someone’s skills. Maybe the city is taking too much of a hold on me.
OSR: Do you have any future plans as a musician?
Ned Stranger: I’m excited to get under the skin of Vienna’s alternative music scene, and maybe meet some classical musicians who want to try something different and join my live band ?! Plus I would love to go somewhere for a few months and record my first solo album, stealing some of my already existing songs and writing new ones that capture an overall theme (probably about the end of the world).
Many thanks to Ned Stranger for speaking with us. For more from Ned Stranger check out his official website, Instagram and Spotify.
